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Preflop Basics – Taking control with aggression

Now that you have a handle on starting hand selection, you already have an edge in most microstakes games. If you’re looking to drastically increase that edge, and consequentially your profits, learning to use preflop aggression properly is key.

Preflop aggression is often regarded as the first ‘secret concept’ of poker strategy. This may seem like a bold statement. A ‘secret concept’… How cheesy. Surely, lots of players know about preflop aggression, particularly those playing higher limits.

Preflop Basics – No limit hold’em hand selection

The basic goal of a poker player is, or should be, to always make decisions with a positive expected value. In other words, to minimize the amount of money one puts into pots while “behind”, and to maximize value from pots in which one is “ahead”. Many beginning micro stakes grinders find this concept elusive. The main objection being, that most players at the lowest limits are so bad, no amount of strategy can ever prevent opponents from getting lucky and winning.

Play Smart – Manage your bankroll

What is a Bankroll?

This seems like an elementary question at best, but I talk to numerous players every day who just don’t seem to understand exactly what constitutes a bankroll. If you’re going to play poker with any degree of seriousness, your bankroll should be your key concern at all times. A good starting point to nurturing and taking care of it is knowing what it is.

Introducing the power of position

Playing positionally aware poker is a concept that you may or may not be already familiar  with. Most losing players aren’t- hence why if you aren’t already, you should be. In a nutshell, position at the poker table is a measurement of how far you sit from the dealer button in a given hand. The point of paying attention to position is to keep track of how early or late you will act in a hand. As you will see, the order in which players act has a significant effect on the dynamics of a hand.

Getting in touch with your mental game

When most people think of poker, they think of cards and hand rankings. Few ever consider the mental aspects of the game, and this is one of the reasons why only a few people win at poker. In online poker, psychological strength and conditioning are equally if not more important than actual card skill.

Top online pros in all games are constantly working on their ‘mental game’ as a means of increasing their edge in already tough player pools.  Mid-stakes grinders essentially make their living off of patience and discipline which are, not surprisingly, both aspects of mental game.

Choosing a cash game specialty

Why specialize?

You’re ready to jump into the game of cash game poker head- first, and that’s great. Maybe you’ve learned the basic strategy behind the game, and you have an idea of how to play a basically profitable poker strategy. You’re miles ahead of most players already, and you’ll probably scrape our a profit when you do play.

That being said, if you want to rise above the bottom feeding, marginally profitable players cluttering online poker tables, you’ve got to be the absolute best at what you do. So, what is it that you do? Silly question, right- you play poker. Sure you do, but so does everyone else.

Poker playing tips

Poker relies on other players not knowing your hand. Although other players cannot see your hand, the way you react can give them a lot of information. Now you might be wondering how this thing applies in online poker. Let’s take for instance poker played in casinos. Suppose a player is dealt a nice hand the chances are he or she will look at the cards and smile, raise eyebrows or constantly looks at his or her own cards, enough to tell your opponents that you have a nice hand.

Understanding the poker odds

When playing poker one of the most important things is to understand the odds of being dealt a particular hand and the chances of improving it. There are 2,598,960 different possible hands in standard poker where 52 cards are used to make five card hands. The chart below will show you the odds of being dealt a particular hand in poker

Beginner poker starting hands

Most new players are curious about what kind of strategy to adopt to become a profitable poker player. Like what kind of hands to stay before the flop, after the flop, what are the pot odds, possibilities, should I bluff or chase a hand and many more. But one of the most important things to remember when you are new at tables is to be aggressive and play tight.

Sit n go tournament strategy

Sit n Go’s are one of the most popular forms of poker tournament online. The tournament format is a one-table game with usually nine or ten players in the game and it starts as soon as the table is full.

Prize money is the total buy-ins from all the players and usually the top three places are paid out in the ratio 50%/30%/20%. So for example if it’s a $5+$0.50 tournament with ten players, the total prize fund is $50 split $25 for first place, $15 for second and $10 for third. The $0.50 is the fee to the poker room from each player.